Glittery Cupcakes

Glittery Cupcakes

My housemate who co-creates most of our novelty cakes was having her 21st birthday at her parents house so I knew they'd be getting her a cake. So as not to interfere we decided to make cupcakes instead.  I had recently just got a cupcake stand as a present and some gorgeous black foil cupcake cases so we were ready to roll. We knew she was wearing a black dress with red shoes so we thought about making red and black cupcakes. We mixed the icing up but for some reason the colours wouldn't work. The black was too grey and the red was too bright. 

So after we threw out an obscene amount of icing we decided to do something simple as we did not have time to pipe any icing. So we mixed up normal icing i.e. water and icing sugar and poured it onto the cupcakes. I had some green/pink edible glitter so we just sprinkled it on top of the cupcakes and voila! We had created simple tasty and pretty cupcakes. It certainly was a change from our usual creations. My other housemate created the top cupcake using edible gold stars and silver sugar balls. 

Mini Glitter Cupcakes

Another example of using the glitter was for another friends 21st in their house where once again I knew the parents would be providing the cake. This time we made mini cupcakes using silicon moulds which meant they had no cases but that didn't matter as they were bitesize. This time we did pipe un-coloured buttercream icing and then decorated the buns with the glitter and balls etc. Making and decorating mini cupcakes is quite time consuming so I invited some friends over to help decorate them. It is great fun and you can have a chat while doing it. The guys are particularly good at it.

I ♥ Macarons!

Homemade Rose Macarons

Yes I did! They weren't perfect but way better than I expected considering all the hype about them! I first came across Macarons when my French mate brought some over for my housemate as a present and I just happened to be at the table at the time and it would of just been rude of me not to try one. They were from Ladureé. At first we were like did you bring these from Paris! But no Ladureé have a counter in Brown Thomas in Dublin. So I tried a rose flavoured one and it was devine! I was hooked and armed witha a voucher for Brown Thomas I had, I bought a big box of Macarons from Ladureé. One of every flavour. Nom Nom.

The Perfect Macaron after Seriouseats.com

A friend of mine who is an excellent cook told me she had got a book on macarons but said she was disapointed as the language wasn't great and it resulted in a not so perfect macaron. Now I think she might of been talking about I ♥ Macarons the must have book on macarons but it is translated from Japanese and supposedly mainly just pretty pictures. So after alot of reading of blogs and so forth I decided to give rose macarons a go, following the advice of this guy, David Lebovitz, who seems to be the dude when it comes to pastries or something like that. He refers to a 'foot' which is the bubbly looking bit on the bottom of the macarons. See the photo above. I didn't achieve this but heres hoping I will next time!

Pencil Marks for the Macarons

Powdered Almond, Powdered Sugar, Granulated Sugar and Egg Whites

Anyway I started off by drawing circles that were about an inch in diameter on some baking paper to act as a guide when I piped the mixture out. I drew 30 of these circles, 15 on for each baking tray. I had ground almonds already but I ground them some more so they were more powdery. However this made the almond clump together. This meant I had to roast the almond on a baking tray to dry it out. I put it in the oven for 10mins and hoped for the best. In the meantime I powdered some sugar in the blender. You could use icing sugar but sometimes this has added cornflour which supposedly causes the macarons to crack. 

Mixing the Colour into the Egg Whites

I whisked the sugar and egg whites up and added the colour (half a cap of red colouring) and a cap of rose water to the mixture at this point as I was folding the rest of the ingredients in later and wouldn't be able to mix the colour at this point. I also made it slightly redder than I wanted as I knew the almonds and powdered sugar would dilute the mix. The almonds were still clumped together after roasting and it required alot of effort to sieve them into the egg whites with the icing sugar as they kept clogging up the sieve. I eventually got there. 

Piped Macarons Ready for Baking

My Syringe with a Plain Cap

So the mixture was easy to but into my syringe piper unlike butter icing which is a nightmare! Runny enough to flow out easy, thick enough to control and pipe into nice domes. I'm sure a skilled hand could spoon them out neatly if no piping bag was available. Once I'd piped them all out I had to rap the baking tray against the counter a few times to flatten the top of the macarons as they are meant to have flat tops not domes. Popped them in the oven at gas mark 1 for 15mins. They looked great. Maybe starting to golden a little which I didn't want as it would ruin the colour. I let them cool and then things went down hill a bit. 

Macarons Fresh Out of the Oven

When I tried to lift the macarons off the baking paper they started to crumble! Perfect shells had formed but there was mainly just a big void of air in the centre with a bit of gooey macaron STUCK to the baking paper! Then I realised I'd used greaseproof paper not baking paper, hence the sticking problem but not why the centre was nothing but air, my Mom thinks I should of left them in for longer. Oh well I'll know next time. Never the less out of the 30 shells as I'm now calling them I managed to salvage maybe 18 or so of them i.e. 9 Macarons. :( I was not a happy bunny but I was still excited as they looked awesome!

Homemade Rose Macarons

I mixed a bit of butter, icing sugar and some rose water up and using my syringe piped it in a circle around the outside of the bottom of the macarons. Ideally I should of filled them but they were so fragile they were cracking under the weight of the filling. It was a very rich filling anyway so it didn't matter. I didn't add any colour to the the filling as the pink and white contrast is quite pretty. I was thinking of flavouring it something different. Maybe vanilla but I was too lazy to go get some from the cupboard (Does anyone else think its strange seeing cupboard written down as everyone glosses over the p?)

Homemade Rose Macarons

Homemade Rose Macarons

So there was a lot of wastage, not a lot of sticky centre, no foot but who cares. They were delicious! I am however going to lay off the rose flavoured stuff for awhile! If you are going to make them I'd read up on it first as there are loads of tips such as leaving over night to develop in flavour. Yea about that.... Anyway if you wanna read more about my tasty adventures check out my Chocolate Fondant or if you want to see some of the costume parties I've been at try the Stretcher Race! 

Tasty Summer Treats!

It is summer time and that means everyone wants light tasty treats packed full of fruit as opposed to rich tasty Biscuit Cake. First up is a strawberry and blueberry roulade. I used the following  Mary Berry Strawberry Roulade Recipe. However, I did not use any almonds or greek yogurt and I added blueberries. The strawberries and blueberries were fresh and locally grown which made for a very tasty treat. It was my first time making a pavlova mixture and I was quite happy with the results. The recipe was excellent and very clear. As you can see the pavlova cracked in places as it was too deep for rolling. This happened because the oven I was using didn't fit a normal size baking tray and I had to use a smaller one! I also over did the filling from an aesthetic point of view but no one complained about the taste.

Strawberry and Blueberry Roulade

Stork Perfect for Cakes

 I am always making strange cupcakes and cakes so I decided for once to make a simple fairy cake... well sort of. I used this recipe by Delia Smith, All in One Sponge Video which I simply spooned into bun cases instead. You need to reduce the baking time by about 5mins for buns instead of a cake.  It is best to use a soft butter that comes in a tub such as Stork Perfect for cakes which is available in the UK and Ireland. Since I did not have any of this butter I used Stork Perfect for Pastry Butter which is also soft but resulted in a more crispier than fluffy sponge as you can see from the photo. This meant that it was difficult to cut the top off the bun and make the traditional fairy cake wings. Therefore I scooped out a circle in the middle carefully so as not to break it up. Dropped in half a teaspoon of raspberry jam followed by a desert spoon of cream. Then I placed the removed sponge back on top and placed half a homegrown raspberry on top.

Raspberry and Cream Fairy Cake

Finally, maybe not quite a summer treat as these pancakes were quite thick for Irish standards and not anywhere near as thin as a crepe would be. However, they were scrumptious and a good alternative to a heavy fry for breakfast on a busy day. They are smaller than usual as the only non-stick pan left in my student house was for frying eggs but I think it was a nice touch. The shapes were cut out using cookie cutters.

The pink sugar was left over from a previous baking experience. I made it by placing ONE drop of red food colouring in a bowl and adding sugar until the desired colour was achieved. It is not uniform in colour at first due to the food colouring clumping together but if you pass it through a sieve the clumps will be removed. Be warned, you need alot of sugar to make it pink, the food colouring goes a long way. It may even be up to 500g! However, I've just been using the sugar as normal in other cakes and it has not effected the colour. Though pancakes take awhile to make and cook they are worth it. Other topping that we had were the traditional lemon and icing sugar, chocolate spread, golden syrup and bananas. Yum. Keeping on the theme of light treats this summer I also made Marshmallows!

Pankcake with Pink Sugar

Pancakes with Chocolate Spread